Cabaret treats on YouTube

Cabaret in all its versions is, was and will possibly always be my favourite musical.

Alan Cumming is my favourite Emcee and he made a docco called The Real Cabaret, where he goes to Berlin to see Christopher Isherwood's flat and seek out reminders of Weimer Kabaret. He also interviews people like Liza Minelli and Ute Lempur. It's great. Here is part one and the rest is on YouTube. 




Alan was the Emcee in Sam Mendes' 1993 Donmar Warehouse production, with Jane Horrocks as Sally.  (Alan rehearsed Cabaret during the day and performed as Hamlet at night!) Sam Mendes went on to direct a little Oscar-winning film called American Beauty and took his production and Alan to Broadway, where Natasha Richardson was Sally. Both versions won stacks of awards.

We saw a big theatre version in Australia with Toby Allen and Tina Arena or Lisa McCune.

Alan's site alone will easily kill a few hours on the web, but he's also an obsessive geek,  and is one of the creators of itsasickness.com, where fellow obsessives can share their passion for anything from Dr Who to coffee or, in Alan's case, truffle oil.

But back to musicals. Now, if Dr Who turned up in the tardis (preferably looking like David Tennant), I'd ask for a soy latte and a trip to 1993 London to see the original Donmar Cabaret cast.

Turns out I don't need to wait for a frolic with a 900-year-old time lord, because there's a damn fine video of the show on YouTube. It's not as good as being there, but I can watch it in my trackies and sing along.

Here's  part one (can't embed it). The whole show is on the Tube and it's amazing.

And speaking of Emcees...look who joined Alan at the Kennedy Centre Honours Kander and Ebb.



But this has to be the the best "Wilkommen" ever.



So what about some Sallys. Of course I love Liza the most (and here she is winning her Oscar), but...

Natasha was wonderful. (SometimesMelbourne doesn't approve of illegal recordings of shows - but thanks!)




And this is a bit fuzzy and the sound drops out, but it was recorded in 1968. It's Judi Dench and a glimpse of Hal Prince's original show.




Jill Hayworth was the first Sally in 1966, so she gets the final song (and there are some stills from the first production).

Liza with a zee

Liza: Australian Tour 2009
25 October
Rod Laver Arena

For all the shows I've seen in the last month or so, this is the one that had me crying.

Uncontrollable tears that made a black farce of the lashings of mascara I applied (along with divine decadence green nail polish, darling) as a tiny symbol of my worship of Liza.

I sat in a sports stadium crying as an oldish woman, who really has lost her voice, growled some old show tunes!

I teared-up when she waked onto the stage, blubbed when she sang  "What makes a man a man?" and there was snot for "Maybe this time". Yes, I am a gay man in a straight woman's body. The boys wearing matching pink sequined waistcoats were butcher than me tonight.

So where's all my too-educated, analysis of this show? Where's my sophisticated criticism of her story telling or her technique?

There is none. I love Liza Minnelli and so did the thousands of other people who joined me to stand and cheer.

What is it about that Liza makes me look past the faults that a young man in his grandmother's fox fur stole was happy to tell me about during the interval?  (And, yes, I was still the most limp wristed one in  the conversation.)

Liza is a goddam, fucking legend superstar who understands that song is story; that grasping the emotion and the soul of a song will win an audience more than a pitch perfect performance.

And I know the person crying tonight was my inner tween. The me who watched Cabaret at an age when she knew little about the Holocaust, let alone abortion, syphilis and bisexuality - but still knew that that was the world she wanted to live in. A world that tells us stories about people and places that make us care, make us cry, make us sing and make us still love green nail polish 30-odd years later.